in thy orisons
by Jaxin88
Summary: He's been locked in his gilded cell for a month when she comes to see him, her arms stiff and her eyes promising violence. The night guards lead her in, watching her warily, and flee when she bids them leave. Set within Beautiful Disaster.


He's been locked in his gilded cell for a month when she comes to see him, her arms stiff and her eyes promising violence. The night guards lead her in, watching her warily, and flee when she bids them leave.

He leans back on the elegant couch, arms behind his head as she prowls in front of his cage. "Well, well, well. I was beginning to think you'd forgotten me."

"You've ensured that is an impossibility."

His thin lips twist. "Nothing is impossible."

She doesn't rise to his bait, instead watching him steadily. She doesn't know this bitter man in front of her, yet he is as familiar as her own shadow. He's been here all along. She had just refused to see him.

He has stripped that safety from her, tearing her history, _their_ history from her without mercy. She raises her chin. "When you first stole the throne, I thought you greedy. Now? Now, I think you a fool."

He stills for a moment before standing with a laugh, but there is no merriment in it. "_I_ am the fool? When the All-Father would have set a drunken, rampaging oaf on the throne?"

"As if you have any right to speak of rampaging."

He snorts, tightening his jaw. "The people of Midgard are but mayflies. What does it matter if they die?"

She clenches her fists, staring at the empty cells beside him. "You truly care so little for anyone but yourself?"

He bows, flicking graceful fingers at her. "Lady, such ignorance surprises me. It's been common knowledge for years."

She had considered herself lucky, once, to see sides of him that he kept hidden from all else. The bile rises in her throat. She'd drawn close to stained glass, claiming greater knowledge for proximity, and blinded herself on the shards.

He raises a dark eyebrow. "Have I silenced the mighty Sif?"

"No," she growls, and his small grin fades as she continues. "I see no one worth speaking to."

Darkness passes over his face, turning his mocking smile into a grimace of something she cannot—_will_ not—name. "The truth will out, I see."

She spins to face him, snarling. "You are one to speak."

At that, his cool facade snaps. "Do not dare call me untruthful, Lady. I have been more honest than any in this fetid, petulant realm. We are _gods,_ not quivering emissaries, and the mortals would do well to remember that."

Her fists slam against the walls and he steps back. "As would _you!_ Those on Midgard might call you a god, Loki, but you are no more or less than anyone on Asgard."

"No less?" He laughs, knuckles pressed bone-white in his fists. "My dear Sif, how you hate being wrong."

The muscle in her jaw spasms as her hand tightens around the hilt of her dagger, the one he'd given her after she first bested him in the practice yard. "I grow tired of your games."

"You're not the only one." He closes his eyes, lips moving in half-discernible spells, and she thinks to raise her voice, to call for the guards, but before she can there is a blade of enchanted ice in his hands, and he is dragging it against his own flesh. She shouts, but not for the guards.

A flicker of a smile crosses his lips. The flat of the knife presses against his skin, but no blood rises. Instead a shadow of color floods his skin, turning it from the pale ivory she knows to a deep, rich blue, criss-crossed with pale designs.

For a moment, she can't hear anything over the roar of the blood in her veins. Her hand is full, wrapped around cold steel. Her sword hits the cell, sparking golden light, and he laughs. It's a hollow sound, coming from Jötunn-blue lips. "Well. Apparently it keeps out as well as in. I had wondered."

The hair on her skin has risen, all of her nerves awake and aware. "What have you done with him?"

He tilts his head, a movement so familiar that her heart aches with it. "Pardon?"

She grits her teeth and asks again. "What have you done with Loki? If you have harmed him, I swear—"

"You swear what? That you'll gut me, run me through? Or will you drag the All-Father in here? It's nothing he hasn't seen before."

There is no mistaking the tightly coiled anger of his body, the clench of his fingers. The bitterness in his voice lowers her blade, but it's back up and balanced before he notices. At least she hopes so. He's never been one to comply with her hopes. "What do you mean?"

The creature in the cell raises an eyebrow. "Must you always be so stubbornly straightforward? One would think you would get tired of it."

"How long?" He stays silent, watching her closely, and she snarls and jams her sword into the prison floor. The fiery shock in her muscles steadies her, centers her. "How _long?_"

"Have I been thus?" He waves his hands over himself, a breathing shadow in the starkly lit cell. "Since birth."

"That's a lie."

"Oh, no. You see, when the All-Father went to war against the Jötnar, he returned with a prize." His teeth are a slice of white on his dark face. "It was all so _very_ well-planned."

She shakes her head, her gaze sliding away from his red eyes. "He didn't—he wouldn't."

Loki passes a hand over his skin, fading it back to the ivory she once knew. "Wouldn't he? He who hung from his own spear?"

The question is out before she can corral it. "How long have you known?" He raises an eyebrow, letting his gaze trail up and down her body, and she lifts her chin.

He smirks. "Long enough."

"That is no answer."

"It's the one you're getting." He tilts his head. "Why? Does it bother you, that I know what you didn't? That you've bedded a Jötunn, not once but _many_ times? And oh," he presses his lips together as he exhales, and she feels the urge to carve them from his face, "the _enthusiasm_."

She hears the night guards on the stairs, and only one thought comes to her mind. "Leave."

For a moment the expression on his face flickers, but it settles into cold nonchalance before she has a chance to identify it. "What?"

It builds in her bones, this rage, setting her blood afire and searing her skin. The guards flinch back from the doorway as her shout echoes through the empty prison. "I said _LEAVE!_" She wrenches her sword free of the floor and storms away, knocking the guards aside.

They glance at each other as the entrance to the prison slams shut behind her, raising their eyebrows. One of them smirks at the other. "Not much of a chance of that, but I wouldn't expect a woman to understand."

There is a blast of magic in the cell behind them, and a voice echoes past their ears as they spin. "When I'm free, _you're first._"

. . .

The queen's quarters are a place of tranquility, a gilded corridor that Sif knows well. It was Frigga's wing she sheltered in when she was accepted as a royal ward, and it is still her first refuge. The doors slam open under her hand, and Frigga looks up from her delicate needlework. "Sif? What is it, child?"

She would have bristled had those words come from another's mouth, but there is too much care in the queen's voice for her to protest. Frigga has ever been a mother to her, from the first day Sif's lady mother dragged her gangly daughter to the palace with her. "Is it true?"

The queen raises an eyebrow, her expression painfully similar to her son's (_not her son)_. "Knowing what you ask after might help."

"Loki." Frigga freezes, her face suddenly bleached of color, vitality. "Is Loki yours?"

She sighs, and for once Sif can see the years that Odin carries so heavily on Frigga's shoulders. The All-Mother traces a finger across her needlework, her eyes as far-seeing as the ravens'. "In the ways that matter, he is. And yet, did I birth him? That, I cannot say I did."

Sif's mouth moves without words, and Frigga watches her steadily. How like her not-son she is. Sif closes her eyes. "This whole time?"

There is a creak, and she opens her eyes to see Frigga approaching her carefully, as one would an injured animal. "My dear, he is the same as he ever was. Wounded and angry and foolish, but still the boy I raised, the friend you knew."

"But I _didn't _know." Frigga's gaze sharpens, and Sif looks away, catching her lip between sharp teeth. "He didn't tell me."

The queen takes her hand gently. "What would you have done?"

A hasty reply rises in her throat, but it stops, stillborn. The Jotnar are the creatures of nightmare, hearts cold as the ice-world they inhabit. And yet Sif has watched Loki laugh, her heart light with his joy. She has blanketed his skin with her own, treasuring his warmth on long winter nights. She knows the facets of his smiles, and she cannot be afraid.

There is only one reply she can give the All-Mother. "He is Loki."

Frigga tips her head forward. "And he is Jötunn."

Sif shakes her head, her voice unsteady. "He is Loki. That is all."

A soft smile shapes Frigga's face, and as she takes Sif into her arms she crooks her fingers in a tiny, arcan gesture.

In a cell beneath the palace, their images flicker and fade.

A lost prince releases a shaken breath.


End file.
